Texas Instruments to Provide HP with ARM SoCs for Servers

Texas Instruments has agreed to provide ARM-based SoCs (System-on-Chips) to Hewlett-Packard as part of its plans to build low-power servers. The chips will be based around quad-core ARM Cortex A15 processors, and will include cores dedicated to particular tasks such as network processing and I/O. HP hopes that support from Texas will allow them to construct a new standard of low-power servers aimed at cloud and telecommunications networks.

HP is not the only server vendor that is experimenting with ARM-based servers, companies such as Dell are also working on bringing ARM technology into the server market. Chip manufacturer AMD has also expressed an interest in building ARM-based server chips, despite the current market being dominated by standard x86 processors. One of the reasons for this is that the x86 architecture is much better at handling database and similar tasks, while ARM chips are better at handling large volumes of search requests.